It has been polished to the devil, which is suspect to me. Not my realm of collecting so I'll let the experts chime in. @messydesk @Cascade @Santinidollar
Looks almost brand new. Raises a few flags immediately in my mind. Could have been cleaned if it was real. And also if you have a scale, it should weigh approximately 26.73 Grams in order for it to be authentic. Also with the flooding of the copied coinage from Chinese manufacturers. It is honestly hard to say in my mind if it is real or not. I would have to say it is fake in my opinion.
....except for the part where the obverse is plainly worn down into the VF range. The reverse image is a bit too blurry for opinion, but the obverse is much better and presents as a heavily-cleaned and polished example. I'm guessing the mint mark is from New Orleans although the same applies to San Francisco - in this grade it's a common coin not really worth counterfeiting (although that hasn't stopped them in the past). The date location is left of normal, but both New Orleans and San Francisco varieties have examples similar. Law of averages says it's a genuine but quite thoroughly cleaned example.
No. Once the damage is done, its fate is sealed. The cleaning definitely pulled the value down a little. As of value, I am not an expert on Morgans enough to say.
Cleaned and polished. If you're new to the Morgan game, you might want to start out with slabbed and graded examples. Buying raw coins off eBay can be hazardous.
I took a good look at this coin I would say that it has defiantly been cleaned in some manner and most probably polished to some degree.
You can't precisely "reverse" the damage, but you can wear the coin additionally until the signs of that damage go away by carrying it as a "pocket piece" along with other change. There's a 1921 Morgan in my pocket as we speak, undergoing that process. It will lose a grade or two along the way, but will at some point - that could be a couple or three years - again just resemble a typical circulated Morgan. At that level of wear, even uncleaned the coin was not worth more than $25-30 or so to begin with, and as a cleaned coin (I don't think it was polished now, the hairlines as shown in your new reverse pic are too prominent; those don't normally survive polishing) it's worth very little over melt value.
Weigh it, See what it does around a Neodymium magnet, Check the diameter and thickness with a caliper. Those 3 things you should have in your bag of tricks to check coins.
